Now I am obliged to again push The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright on you and to ask you to push it to your still-in-the-dark-about Islamist-ideology friends. Recall that Wright is a man of the left, the New Yorker’s national correspondent, and that The Looming Tower won the Pulitzer. This book entails the return of the takfiris to modern Islamist groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, in the second half of the 20th century right through the attack on America on 9/11. It is a genealogy of al Qaeda, and though it does not chart the further spread of this strain of Islamist virus to Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt and now western Iraq and Syria in the past five years, the nature of the ideology is full explicated and made impossible-to-misunderstand, which is exactly what President Obama and his inner circle need so desperately.

The same sort of reaction is due the president’s declaration that ISIL is not Islamic, and the same sort of wonder and worry followed the president’s clueless announcement. Many have remarked that George W. Bush went to great lengths to declare that we are not at war with Islam and W was right to do so, and President Obama would be right to do so as well. But that is very different from denying the reality of the takfiri strain of Islam, its numbers and its potential for viral growth –a growth we see all too clearly in Iraq and Syria and indeed around the globe.

In yesterday’s interview with me, Charles Krauthammer bluntly declared that the president ” is clearly a narcissist” who “sees himself in very world historical terms, which means A) because he’s an amateur, he doesn’t know very much, and B) because he’s a narcissist, he doesn’t listen.”

Krauthammer added “he talks like the emperor, Napoleon,” and that “[t]here’s not anyone of independent stature around him,” that he is “is impervious to outside advice.”

“The man lives in a cocoon surrounded by sycophants,” concluded Krauthammer, whose book “Things That Matter” just passed the million books sold mark, and who is clearly among the most influential voices in America right now, and not just on the right though the president no doubt would like to dismiss him as such.

Someone broke through the cocoon on the issue of Ebola. Somehow the president figured out the response had to be instantaneous and adequate to the task of containing the virus. He didn’t count the cost and he didn’t worry about how his actions would be judged by history. He acted.

Now he needs to do the same thing vis-a-vis IS, and people across the political spectrum are pushing him to do so. Last week, retired Army General and CIA Director David Petraeus and retired CentCom Commander and Marine General James Mattis –perhaps the two greatest war fighters of the past decade– both urged the president to do more faster. Even President Bush who has strictly observed a “no criticism of my successor” [policy hinted at Cuyahoga Community College that a vacuum had developed that we needed to remedy quickly, as close as he could come to pushing the president to focus and focus immediately on the viral threat of takfiri radicalism within Islam.

This is just chaos, a breakdown in the response of the American government to the deadliest threat in the world right now, and that threat isn’t Ebola, it is IS.

The only message the president is likely to hear on IS is the sound of a political earthquake on November 4, the crashing in on him of political reality via a massive turn-out of Senate and House Democrats. The election arrives at exactly the moment needs it to deliver a huge rebuke to the isolated, “self-involved,” cocooning president. A message that says: You wanted the job, so do it.